Much research has been conducted in this area, primarily in the field of computer and robotic vision, rather than for digitising per se; relevant work and alternative schemes are considered and compared where appropriate. In particular, consideration is given to existing digitising methods, image processing techniques, and structured illumination models. In spite of the research that has already been conducted into three dimensional digitising and related fields, there remains a complete absence of portable and inexpensive digitisers, which provides the original motivation for this research. The aim of this work is to conduct a comprehensive study of the whole process of 3D digitising, and to demonstrate the feasibility of a portable digitiser through a modular software approach. The main contributions to the field are: 1. An improved design of structured illumination. 2. Dedicated image processing algorithms for the rapid extraction of vector information from bitmaps without user interaction, including some adaptive image processing algorithms. A consideration of the use of the flood fill algorithm as an area segmentation operation. 3. A geometry based method for obtaining sub-pixel accuracy from vectorised bitmaps. 4. A pipeline design for a cheap, portable, rugged, colour digitising camera, adaptable to a multitude of real world applications. The construction of this document broadly follows the pipeline process it describes. The first section is dedicated to a survey of the current state of the art, and this is followed by a brief overview of the pipeline, which should be sufficient to allow individuals to select areas of interest in the work as a whole and to obtain a high level understanding of the research. Subsequent chapters are dedicated to individual stages in the pipeline, namely: image enhancement; vector map extraction; vector map enhancement; correspondence mapping and model generation which are followed by my concluding remarks in the final chapter.